Channel Five will be airing ABC’s new drama series Flash Forward on Monday 28th September, just a mere four days after the series premieres on US network ABC. Five are keen to minimise the gap between the US and UK launches of the show in order to reduce the chances of viewers downloading Flash Forward episodes online, thus hampering the all important viewing figures. Hopes are high that the gamble taken on the series will be as fruitful as recent US imports to the UK, in particular Five’s ratings-winner The Wire, which gained a strong fanbase.
The show will air for the first time on US channel ABC from 24th September, replacing the long-running show Lost, with the last series of the castaway drama concluding at the end of August.
Flash Forward sees Joseph Fiennes - formerly of international stardom thanks to a turn as William Shakespeare in the 1998 film Shakespeare In Love - following in Hugh Laurie’s footsteps by adopting an American accent for the role of troubled L.A. cop Mark Benford. Fiennes manages to pull it off quite convincingly it must be said. It’s just a shame that, on the face of this first episode at least, the acting isn’t quite up to the standard of his US accent.
Advance Screening of Flash Forward Brought Mixed Reviews
The audible chuckling from certain sections of the audience during Flash Forward’s screening at the Edinburgh International Television Festival might be a slight worry for Five and ABC. For what is supposed to be a serious drama, it has to be said that there was a show of acting more wooden than an IKEA flatpack, with some delivery airing far to close to the melodramatic for comfort.
However, this is just the first episode from a series that creator David S. Goyer, the writer behind movie hit Batman Begins, has expressed his wish to expand to three, possibly even five series’. There’s a lot of expansion to be had, and in a day when TV dramas can rarely afford to be slow burners, the first episode leaves the viewer with undoubted intrigue as to where this will lead.
Whereas other US shows have fallen foul of the constant demand for more, stringing out storylines that could seemingly go on for an eternity provided the writers and audience’s permit, Goyer has recently stated his intention to set a target for Flash Forward’s conclusion. A definite plan is in place for the first series, encouraging news considering the meandering storylines of other US shows such as Heroes and Lost, which leave the impression that the screenwriters themselves have no idea where the series will end up.
Outline of Flash Forward: Episode 1
Flash Forward, based on Robert J. Sawyer’s 1999 novel of the same name, opens at the scene of a road accident on an L.A. motorway with Fiennes’ character at the centre of the action.
The audience is then taken backwards through time - four hours before the accident to be precise - and introduced, like any long running drama, to a series of characters that are all interconnected in some capacity, each with their own particular foibles.
There's a proper introduction to Mark, a recovering alcoholic, seen attending an AA meeting that vastly contrasts what initially seems to be a conservative, family orientated individual. His wife, Olivia, is a surgeon based in the city with the viewer party to her strained relationship with fellow doctor Bryce, who instead of being at work on the morning of the disaster is contemplating suicide on a pier somewhere in L.A. with a loaded gun in hand.
The plot is sprung wide open on the mid-point with a rather mysterious event whereby everyone on Earth (literally everyone) loses consciousness for exactly 2 minutes 17 seconds, regardless of where they are or what they’re doing.
Helicopters and planes fall out of the sky, cars crash, surfers drown, and L.A. hospitals go into meltdown.
Mark, being the industrious detective that he is, is swiftly placed in charge of an investigation by L.A. PD Director Stanford Wedeck (Courtney B. Vance) to piece together information regarding the blackouts and whom, if anyone, is responsible. Together with his partner Demetri (John Cho) and Janis Hawk (Christine Woods), the crack team of detectives begin to compile as many experiences of the blackout as possible, and it isn’t long before they realise that something very strange connects each and every experience.
It appears that somehow every person on Earth experienced a vision of the future during the 2 minutes 17 seconds that they were out cold. Each vision was a flash forward (you didn’t think it was called that for nothing did you?) to the exact moment of 10pm on April 29th, featuring their exact activities at the time. What people saw during this period is the starting block to piecing together a map of future events, however, not every vision, as Demetri and Olivia discover, is to everyone’s liking.
Even more mysterious is the revelation that a young girl named Charlie, a patient of Olivia’s at the hospital, has experienced a strange dream where there were - as she puts it - “no more good days”.
Flash Forward Summary
Flash Forward is certainly a series with many avenues to explore, with every character experiencing some sort of turmoil following the blackouts. There are definite similarities with both 24 (with the investigation into the blackouts surely driving the series forward) and Heroes (with the supernatural element to the storyline) within Flash Forward.
Hopefully, unlike Heroes, which became increasingly difficult to watch with such a detailed and confusing inter-weaving of characters that became cluttered in its third series, Flash Forward doesn’t try to over complicate matters. Sadly, the list of characters on the shows website, some of whom didn't even feature in the first episode (including Lost star Dominic Monaghan) may suggest otherwise. However, on first inspection and with only one episode to go by, this series certainly has real potential to become a hit with British audiences.
First Episode Verdict 'No More Good Days': 4/5
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